Shawshank Redemption - What we need... the most!

 How late to a party can one get?

In my case 25 years plus.  I am watching one of the best most acclaimed movies 26 years after it was released and nominated for the best picture Oscar. 

But I am not the only one – the movie didn’t become a hit and collected less than half its budget at the box office.  Instead it became a success when people saw it through the VHS rentals.

MAD Magazines (and Moghul Library, Hyderabad)

Comics were an important part of my childhood like my first blogpost which was dedicated to ACK comics showed.

MAD called itself a ‘magazine’ and was fairly popular both in the US and India and this success in itself was a surprise.

The second helping…

One of my social acquaintances - a voracious consumer of books, movies, TV serials, newspapers etc  mentioned he’d seen only one TV series again as in twice.  No, He wasnt showing off - but it was purely a mindset that a lot of folks have including my better half - my wife.

“Why are you watching this again, havent we seen this before?” if I am watching a movie on TV - one that we have seen before. I sigh and move on.

The very talented Mr. Subodh Poddar

Its very rare to be a witness in the creation of beautiful art, and I was lucky to be on the sidelines and watch as this happened. 

So, I am in the company wide Jamboree that I had spoken about earlier (much much earlier, when this blog was created here), and one of the 200 attendees is Subodh Poddar, a film maker, creative director and also artist.

The Telugu Cinema Industry - “Muthyala Muggu”

Most of my exposure to Telugu films was thanks to the India’s national TV channel DoorDarshan. When I was a kid there was only the local TV station which was in Hyderabad and used to broadcast only a few hours everyday. 

While the programming was mostly terrible, the good part used to be the movies they showed. There used to be a Hindi film and a Telugu film shown during the weekends, and they were mostly from the B&W era, and very rarely a few recent films.

From Dusk till Dawn- the movie

I recently completed viewing The hateful eight by Quentin Tarantino (recommended viewing, will surprise you).  And it reminded me to complete this post about 'From Dusk till Dawn' (FDTD) which is one of the most ‘wild’est movies I had seen, which was written and directed by Tarantino’s friend, and featured Tarantino as one of the lead roles.

Munich, Fauda and The Bridge of Spies (& Badlapur)

There’s a common thread to these (& Badlapur too).

The movies Munich & The bridge of Spies come from Steven Spielberg, while the TV series Fauda comes from Israel.

Satyajit Ray Presents 1 & 2

Doordarshan is India’s legacy national TV channel, owned and managed by the Government.  This was the only TV station available for my generation in our childhood and we therefore had mostly limited choice and terrible stuff to watch.

Yet, sometimes they’d get it right.

One such was when the almighty Satyajit Ray, possibly India’s greatest film director, collaborated with his Son Sandip Ray, to produce a TV series aptly named… “Satyajit Ray Presents” (SPR)  They produced another sequel a few years later named SPR2.